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If you watched the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, you may remember that Bill Nye used tree ring evidence to support the idea that there was not a global flood 4,000 ago. He said that they found evidence of a tree that was dated by humans to be 9,500 years old.

Beside the fact that there’s a big difference between 10,000 and 5,000,000,000 (the supposed evolutionary age of the earth, a problem that wasn’t really addressed), he was playing on a childhood belief that there is only one tree ring per year on a tree.

A little research into the science of tree dating reveals that it is a well known fact that, sometimes, trees produce more rings than one in a year. I wouldn’t throw away your belief in a young earth based on Bill Nye’s arm chair analysis.

To learn a bit more about the assumptions that go into dating trees, see these articles:

Remember, evidence isn’t proof because scientists can be wrong. Even when something is likely to be true, it doesn’t mean that it is true. Sometimes, unlikely things happen. In this case, it wasn’t even unlikely. Sometimes, trees produce more that one ring a year, and scientists already know this.

Neutrality is actually a fallacy. That’s because “neutrality” is a position.

A person who decides to be neutral is taking a position of neutrality, therefore, they are not being neutral. They are relying on a self-refuting logical argument. Not only that, they are implying that every philosophy that takes a position is wrong, usually while convincing themselves that it is an expression of tolerance!

It is not unusual to hear people assert that they come to scientific evidence neutrally, but this a denial of the obvious fact that everyone takes a position. Evidence can’t talk (even though some say it speaks for itself). Evidence requires a method of interpretation or else the “evidence” is just a set of objects without significance. To deny the method of interpretation is another way to deny taking a position.

It is also common for nations, business and individuals to claim the be neutral in regard to religious beliefs. Once again, this attempt to tolerate them all, denies them all since all of them are asserting their own position. Just because a person claims to not be doing something, doesn’t mean that that is what they are actually doing. You can claim to love someone while harming them. The same thing happens when a person claims to be religiously neutral and then disallows any of them to be expressed. The fact is that a secular position is being promoted under the disguise of “neutrality.”

The claim: “I am neutral” is itself a non-neutral claim because it assumes that “Neutrality exists.” Asserting this claim, is taking a position against those who don’t believe it exists. When a person asserts a position, they are not being neutral. Therefore, the claim that neutrality exists is a fallacy. Dr. Jason Lisle calls this fallacy: “The Pretended Neutrality Fallacy” in his book “The Ultimate Proof of Creation”.

Both Evolutionists and Creationists aren’t really neutral. They may convince themselves that they are, but by choosing to believe in neutrality they are not only taking a position, they are being irrational. It’s understandable that evolutionists would be irrational, because they don’t have a basis for logic or morality in their worldview, but Christians actually have a moral obligation to be rational because it’s biblical.

Christians are supposed to be honest about the fact that they are not neutral. Jesus said that people were either for Him or against Him. He never said that there were people who were “on the fence.” Instead, He made it clear that the fence didn’t exist. By doing this, He exposed everyone’s position. Claiming to be neutral is to say that Jesus is wrong. When you say that Jesus is wrong, you taking a very bold, non-neutral position.

So, the claim that a person is neutral is fallacious because it is based on the non-neutral position that neutrality exists. Christians should be aware of this and not be persuaded by the fallacy of neutrality.

It is evident that Bill Nye committed a significant logical error in the recent debate with Ken Ham at the Creation Museum. The problem with a logical fallacy is that it can sound right to people, even though an argument hasn’t really been made yet. This article explains the fallacy that Bill Nye committed every time he would contrast “us in the scientific community” with “Ken Ham’s creation model”. This article does a great job of addressing what the “no true Scotsman” fallacy is, how Bill Nye committed it and how he was merely insulating himself against responding to the issue. Instead of answering with a discussion about why Ken Ham’s creation model wasn’t scientific, he merely implied that real scientists don’t use it. In a very real sense, Bill Nye didn’t actually debate the issue.

…early creation scientists forged the paths of each of today’s major scientific branches of inquiry, like Isaac Newton’s physics,4 Matthew Maury’s oceanography, Louis Pasteur’s immunology,5 Michael Faraday’s electromagnetism,6 and George Carver’s agriculture.7,8 Are we to believe that Newton and Pasteur were not real scientists?

Apparently, facts like these do not matter to someone who is so fully committed to the false idea that real scientists only believe in evolution that he is more than willing to adjust the very definition of scientist to preserve his argument.

I want to address one of Bill Nye’s supposed pieces of evidence about evolution he offered in the recent debate between he and Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis. He showed a slide with a bunch of skulls on it and suggested that it was some kind of proof for evolution. In this video, Dr. David Menton, who is actually an expert in these things. Explains the real issue and does so in a very enjoyable way.

I’m sure the video is easily worth the money (I have his whole “Body of Evidence” set) but the trailer is educational in itself. Check out: 3 Ways to Make an Ape Man. By the way, Answers in Genesis has linked the video to articles explaining away other things that Bill said as well.

Science is the study of physical things that can be repeatedly observed, and by doing experiments, it has been observed that order is a fundamental element of physical systems. In living systems, this order takes the form of programming, which we recognize as a very complicated form of linguistic information. This doesn’t fit well with the ideas of evolution because evolution usually tries to explain change as a random process that happens when energy is applied to matter. I believe, that at least one reason we don’t consider this to be a problem, is because we were only exposed to part of the truth about the fundamental elements of universe in school.

In an effort to stay within the bounds of naturalism, public schools teach two things that don’t work together. We see this in the difference between what was taught in health class and what was taught in science class.

In health class, we are warned about germs and ways to protect ourselves from doing things like eating canned goods that have had the seal broken. We are told that as long as the seal of a canned item is unbroken, an unwanted organism cannot get through and contaminate it.

Now when we go to science class, we are told something else, but it isn’t obvious at first. Evolutionary science teaches something that could be simplified into a formula like this:

Matter + Energy = Life!

One thing that was shown to me is that we are capable of doing this experiment ourselves, but I suggest that we go back to health class to do it! Let’s take a sealed can of beans and put it in a shaking machine. Let’s also heat it up to just above room temperature. Let’s leave it there all day. Then let’s open it up at the end of the day and see what kinds of new life has formed.

Note that we had this formula:

Beans + (Shaking and Heat) = ?

To our dismay, when we open the can we find no new life. There is no mold or anything. We added a significant amount of heat and shaking. The amount of pounds of pressure that was sent through the can could probably have built a house. What we are experiencing is a way in which the formula we are taught in science class doesn’t appear to work. We still eat cans of beans that haven’t been opened yet, even though the temperature has changed, it has been shaken and light has been showing on it. We could have even been exposed to an magnet. Did you realize that this experiment is performed over and over every day all over the world? There are literally millions of cans being stored every year. The government is so concerned with the reality of this that they make laws to ensure that business abide by health class rules and not science class rules.

Here’s the formula being carefully controlled by health organizations:

Matter + Energy + Information = Life!

I would argue that there are actually three fundamentals of nature and one of them isn’t physical. Information is from outside nature. It’s “super” natural, and we don’t observe nature without it. Once the right kind of information is introduced into a can of beans, we quickly discover new life forms. If information is kept from being introduced into the experiment, only the existing life forms are left, but only until they break down (but that’s another topic).

The Bible has been telling us the truth the whole time. Even when we didn’t understand the nature of germs or DNA yet. Unlike a science book, it didn’t have to change to protect its philosophy.